What Is a Concentration Camp? Ellis Island Exhibit Prompts a Debate

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: March 8, 1998

An exhibit opening on Ellis Island next month will revisit an ugly chapter of modern history: the story of tens of thousands of families who, because of their ancestry, were forced from their homes during World War II and corralled into camps, encircled by barbed wire and guarded by armed sentries.

The exhibit concerns the involuntary incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of them United States citizens, from 1942 to 1946, and its title is ''America's Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese-American Experience.''

Even before it opens, the exhibit has inspired an emotional debate over those two stark words in the title: concentration camp.

Ellis Island officials and some Jewish groups have objected to the use of the phrase, contending that most Americans associate the term with the Nazi death camps of the Holocaust. Using it to describe the internment of Japanese-Americans, they say, could diminish the horror of the Nazi slaughter.

But curators at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, who mounted the exhibit, defend the term as a historically accurate description of the experience of Japanese-Americans, solely on the basis of their ancestry.

Both sides in the debate are treading delicately, going out of their way to avoid seeming insensitive to the suffering of others. But the debate clearly goes beyond the semantic, touching on the questions of how to remember a people's suffering and who has the right to tell that story.

David A. Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee in New York, said the exhibit's title ''dilutes what we have come to understand as the meaning of concentration camps.''

''Since the Second World War, these terms have taken on a specificity and a new level of meaning that deserves protection,'' said Mr. Harris, whose group is convening a private meeting of Jewish and Japanese-American leaders tomorrow to air their disagreements. ''A certain care needs to be exercised.''

The curators of the exhibit said they never intended to equate the internment experience and the Holocaust. But they said the phrase ''concentration camp'' is justified because that is how some government officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and justices of the Supreme Court, referred to the policy.

Karen Ishizuka, the senior curator at the Japanese American National Museum, said the term best describes, from a Japanese-American perspective, the experience of those who were incarcerated without due process. ''We need to call them what they were,'' said Ms. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese-American whose parents and grandparents were imprisoned during the war. ''The exhibit depicts an episode in American history that too few people understand.''

Many Japanese-Americans use the terms ''relocation'' or ''internment'' camp, rather than concentration camp, in describing their confinement. But the exhibit curators said they did not invoke the phrase simply to be provocative. ''There's no intent to compare or mitigate the absolute horror of the Holocaust,'' Ms. Ishizuka said. ''This happens to be our experience, and it is our responsibility to tell it the way we experienced it.''

The exhibit elicited little controversy when it was on view at the Japanese American National Museum from November 1994 to November 1995. Officials of the Ellis Island Foundation, a private fund-raising group that helps bring rotating exhibits to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, invited organizers to mount the show there.

But in January, in a letter to Ms. Ishizuka, the Ellis Island superintendent, Diane H. Dayson, expressed concern that because ''concentration camps'' today connotes death camps, the ''very large Jewish community'' in New York City ''could be offended by or misunderstand'' the title. In another letter two weeks later, she said the exhibit could not appear unless the term was removed from the title.

The curators objected, prompting United States Senator Daniel K. Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii who sits on the Japanese-American museum's board, to appeal to the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, who oversees Ellis Island as a national historic site. Soon after, Ms. Ishizuka said, she was told the exhibit could go on, with the original title. The show, which includes mementos, family snapshots and home movies from the camps, will continue through January.

Edie Sheehan Hammond, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service regional office in Philadelphia, said that Ms. Dayson had simply feared that the controversy about the title would overshadow the content of the exhibit. ''The National Park Service is committed to telling this story,'' she said.

The dispute in some ways recalls the controversy over an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution two years ago about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The show was drastically scaled back after veterans' groups and some politicians complained that the original version was too sympathetic to the Japanese. And just last year, Ellis Island officials asked organizers of an exhibit on the Armenian massacre to remove photographs and text considered ''too gory.'' The officials backed down after community leaders and politicians intervened.